Drug Abuse

 

 

Pubdate: Thu, 5 Mar 2009

Source: Economist, The (UK)

Copyright: 2009 The Economist Newspaper Limited

Contact: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Website: http://www.economist.com/

 

Failed States and Failed Policies

 

HOW TO STOP THE DRUG WARS

 

Prohibition Has Failed; Legalisation Is the Least Bad Solution

 

A HUNDRED years ago a group of foreign diplomats gathered in Shanghai

for the first-ever international effort to ban trade in a narcotic

drug. On February 26th 1909 they agreed to set up the International

Opium Commission--just a few decades after Britain had fought a war

with China to assert its right to peddle the stuff.

 

Many other bans of mood-altering drugs have followed.

 

In 1998 the UN General Assembly committed member countries to

achieving a "drug-free world" and to "eliminating or significantly

reducing" the production of opium, cocaine and cannabis by 2008.

 

That is the kind of promise politicians love to make. It assuages the

sense of moral panic that has been the handmaiden of prohibition for a century.

 

It is intended to reassure the parents of teenagers across the world.

 

Yet it is a hugely irresponsible promise, because it cannot be fulfilled.

 

Next week ministers from around the world gather in Vienna to set

international drug policy for the next decade.

 

Like first-world-war generals, many will claim that all that is

needed is more of the same. In fact the war on drugs has been a

disaster, creating failed states in the developing world even as

addiction has flourished in the rich world.

 

By any sensible measure, this 100-year struggle has been illiberal,

murderous and pointless.

 

That is why The Economist continues to believe that the least bad

policy is to legalise drugs.

 

"Least bad" does not mean good. Legalisation, though clearly better

for producer countries, would bring (different) risks to consumer

countries. As we outline below, many vulnerable drug-takers would

suffer. But in our view, more would gain.

 

The Evidence of Failure

 

Nowadays the UN Office on Drugs and Crime no longer talks about a

drug-free world.

 

Its boast is that the drug market has "stabilised", meaning that more

than 200m people, or almost 5% of the world's adult population, still

take illegal drugs--roughly the same proportion as a decade ago.

(Like most purported drug facts, this one is just an educated guess:

evidential rigour is another casualty of illegality.) The production

of cocaine and opium is probably about the same as it was a decade

ago; that of cannabis is higher.

 

Consumption of cocaine has declined gradually in the United States

from its peak in the early 1980s, but the path is uneven (it remains

higher than in the mid-1990s), and it is rising in many places,

including Europe.

 

This is not for want of effort.

 

The United States alone spends some $40 billion each year on trying

to eliminate the supply of drugs.

 

It arrests 1.5m of its citizens each year for drug offences, locking

up half a million of them; tougher drug laws are the main reason why

one in five black American men spend some time behind bars. In the

developing world blood is being shed at an astonishing rate. In

Mexico more than 800 policemen and soldiers have been killed since

December 2006 (and the annual overall death toll is running at over

6,000). This week yet another leader of a troubled drug-ridden

country--Guinea Bissau--was assassinated.

 

Yet prohibition itself vitiates the efforts of the drug warriors.

 

The price of an illegal substance is determined more by the cost of

distribution than of production. Take cocaine: the mark-up between

coca field and consumer is more than a hundredfold. Even if dumping

weedkiller on the crops of peasant farmers quadruples the local price

of coca leaves, this tends to have little impact on the street price,

which is set mainly by the risk of getting cocaine into Europe or the

United States.

 

Nowadays the drug warriors claim to seize close to half of all the

cocaine that is produced.

 

The street price in the United States does seem to have risen, and

the purity seems to have fallen, over the past year. But it is not

clear that drug demand drops when prices rise. On the other hand,

there is plenty of evidence that the drug business quickly adapts to

market disruption. At best, effective repression merely forces it to

shift production sites.

 

Thus opium has moved from Turkey and Thailand to Myanmar and southern

Afghanistan, where it undermines the West's efforts to defeat the Taliban.

 

AL Capone, but on a Global Scale

 

Indeed, far from reducing crime, prohibition has fostered gangsterism

on a scale that the world has never seen before.

 

According to the UN's perhaps inflated estimate, the illegal drug

industry is worth some $320 billion a year. In the West it makes

criminals of otherwise law-abiding citizens (the current American

president could easily have ended up in prison for his youthful

experiments with "blow"). It also makes drugs more dangerous: addicts

buy heavily adulterated cocaine and heroin; many use dirty needles to

inject themselves, spreading HIV; the wretches who succumb to "crack"

or "meth" are outside the law, with only their pushers to "treat"

them. But it is countries in the emerging world that pay most of the price.

 

Even a relatively developed democracy such as Mexico now finds itself

in a life-or-death struggle against gangsters.

 

American officials, including a former drug tsar, have publicly

worried about having a "narco state" as their neighbour.

 

The failure of the drug war has led a few of its braver generals,

especially from Europe and Latin America, to suggest shifting the

focus from locking up people to public health and "harm reduction"

(such as encouraging addicts to use clean needles). This approach

would put more emphasis on public education and the treatment of

addicts, and less on the harassment of peasants who grow coca and the

punishment of consumers of "soft" drugs for personal use. That would

be a step in the right direction.

 

But it is unlikely to be adequately funded, and it does nothing to

take organised crime out of the picture.

 

Legalisation would not only drive away the gangsters; it would

transform drugs from a law-and-order problem into a public-health

problem, which is how they ought to be treated.

 

Governments would tax and regulate the drug trade, and use the funds

raised (and the billions saved on law-enforcement) to educate the

public about the risks of drug-taking and to treat addiction.

 

The sale of drugs to minors should remain banned.

 

Different drugs would command different levels of taxation and

regulation. This system would be fiddly and imperfect, requiring

constant monitoring and hard-to-measure trade-offs. Post-tax prices

should be set at a level that would strike a balance between damping

down use on the one hand, and discouraging a black market and the

desperate acts of theft and prostitution to which addicts now resort

to feed their habits.

 

Selling even this flawed system to people in producer countries,

where organised crime is the central political issue, is fairly easy.

The tough part comes in the consumer countries, where addiction is

the main political battle.

 

Plenty of American parents might accept that legalisation would be

the right answer for the people of Latin America, Asia and Africa;

they might even see its usefulness in the fight against terrorism.

 

But their immediate fear would be for their own children.

 

That fear is based in large part on the presumption that more people

would take drugs under a legal regime.

 

That presumption may be wrong. There is no correlation between the

harshness of drug laws and the incidence of drug-taking: citizens

living under tough regimes (notably America but also Britain) take

more drugs, not fewer. Embarrassed drug warriors blame this on

alleged cultural differences, but even in fairly similar countries

tough rules make little difference to the number of addicts: harsh

Sweden and more liberal Norway have precisely the same addiction rates.

 

Legalisation might reduce both supply (pushers by definition push)

and demand (part of that dangerous thrill would go). Nobody knows for certain.

 

But it is hard to argue that sales of any product that is made

cheaper, safer and more widely available would fall. Any honest

proponent of legalisation would be wise to assume that drug-taking as

a whole would rise.

 

There are two main reasons for arguing that prohibition should be

scrapped all the same. The first is one of liberal principle.

Although some illegal drugs are extremely dangerous to some people,

most are not especially harmful. (Tobacco is more addictive than

virtually all of them.) Most consumers of illegal drugs, including

cocaine and even heroin, take them only occasionally. They do so

because they derive enjoyment from them (as they do from whisky or a

Marlboro Light). It is not the state's job to stop them from doing so.

 

What about addiction?

 

That is partly covered by this first argument, as the harm involved

is primarily visited upon the user. But addiction can also inflict

misery on the families and especially the children of any addict, and

involves wider social costs.

 

That is why discouraging and treating addiction should be the

priority for drug policy. Hence the second argument: legalisation

offers the opportunity to deal with addiction properly.

 

By providing honest information about the health risks of different

drugs, and pricing them accordingly, governments could steer

consumers towards the least harmful ones. Prohibition has failed to

prevent the proliferation of designer drugs, dreamed up in

laboratories. Legalisation might encourage legitimate drug companies

to try to improve the stuff that people take. The resources gained

from tax and saved on repression would allow governments to guarantee

treatment to addicts--a way of making legalisation more politically

palatable. The success of developed countries in stopping people

smoking tobacco, which is similarly subject to tax and regulation,

provides grounds for hope.

 

A Calculated Gamble, or Another Century of Failure?

 

This newspaper first argued for legalisation 20 years ago. Reviewing

the evidence again, prohibition seems even more harmful, especially

for the poor and weak of the world.

 

Legalisation would not drive gangsters completely out of drugs; as

with alcohol and cigarettes, there would be taxes to avoid and rules

to subvert.

 

Nor would it automatically cure failed states like Afghanistan. Our

solution is a messy one; but a century of manifest failure argues for

trying it.

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